How Often Should You Email Your List?

How Often Should You Email Your List?

The most common question I receive about email marketing is: How often should you email your list?

And this is a really important question to get right.

It’s really important to get this right because there’s obviously a balancing act.

You could try and email your list every day, three times a day and yes, you’ll probably sell a lot of products and services in the short run.

But that’s really going to hurt you in the long run.

You’re going to get a lot of unsubscribes and probably a lot of abuse complaints as well.

You may even be labelled as a spammer and that’s going to hurt your deliverability.

So you don’t want to overdo it, but equally, you don’t want do under do it either.

If you never sell to your products and services to your list, what’s the point in having people on an email list? What’s the point in having subscribers in the first place?

You need to sell to make all of this worth it and to make email marketing worth it.

We may be in business for the fun of it but we’re also looking to make money.

Content is key

The first thing I always recommend is that you send your list a piece of content at least once a week.

If you’re doing any sort of online advertising, whether that’s Facebook campaigns, Google campaigns, email marketing, SEO, etc. hopefully you’re producing at least one piece of quality content per week.

In that content email, it’s really important that you don’t sell any products or services.

Within the email itself, just tell your subscribers about the piece of content, why they want to go read or watch it, why it’s going to help them, and then direct them to that piece of content.

And within that content itself, you could sell your products and services.

You might deliver value with your content and also link to your products and services.

And you will make some sales by doing that.

You’re not going to generate a huge amount of sales from these emails but…

Because you are sending your subscribers content, you aren’t going to burn out your list.

This is a way to sell in small quantities and drip feed in sales without burning out your list.

And it will make it easier for you to sell your products and services later down the line because you are providing that value upfront.

So far, it’s really simple.

You’re just emailing your list once or twice per week with a piece of high quality content.

If you’re not able to produce content that often, it’s absolutely fine to link to other people’s content.

Obviously, it’s better if it’s your own content.

That’s going to do more for your brand and your business, but it’s perfectly fine to do that instead.

Monthly sales promotions

On top of the content emails, I recommend that once a month you run some sort of relatively aggressive sales promotion to your email list.

This could be something like a three day flash sale where you’re heavily discounting a product or service.

In that case you would send an email on each of those three days to encourage your subscribers to take advantage of the sale.

You want to be relatively aggressive with this sales promotion. But by only doing it once a month you want burn out your list and see excessively high unsubscribe rates.

Some unsubscribes is the price you have to pay to make sales but it’s definitely a price worth paying.

Use national holidays

Within each month, you can run your sales promotion whenever you want.

But I have found it’s best if you can attach it to some sort of well known promotion or national holiday.

Depending on your industry and the time of year, you could run a Christmas sale, a Valentine’s Day sale, a Black Friday sale, etc.

When you attach an email promotion to a national holiday or something like a Black Friday that people know about, it will help improve your results.

People are in a buying mentality and they’ll be more forgiving if you sell aggressively.

Summary

So it’s very simple, you want to be emailing your list once or twice per week with a piece of content> Ideally your own content but not necessarily.

Don’t directly sell anything in those content emails.

You can sell within the content but not within the email.

And then on top of that, once a month, look to run a relatively aggressive sale.

Something like a three to five day sale.

Attach the sale to a national holiday if possible and really make sure it’s a good deal.

Once a month strikes the balance between nicely monetizing your email list without burning them out. And it prevents you from jeopardising the long term viability and profitability of your email subscribers.

5-Part Facebook Ad Template

Before you go, there’s something I want to quickly mention that I think you’d be very interested in if you’re running ads on Facebook.

And that’s my 5-Part Facebook Ad Template which you can download right now for free.

This ad template includes some of the best performing ads I’ve created for my clients in a number of different industries.

I’ve broken each ad down into their five elements and explained what I’ve included in each one and why.

So if you’re looking to advertise on Facebook, you can model from these and you should find it really, really useful.

As I said, you could download this for free here: https://heathmedia.co.uk/facebook-ad-template-lp/

Talk soon,

Ben